Imperialism and Prostitution in Haiti (1915-1934)

This article offers a reconstruction of prostitution in Haiti under the 1915-1934 US Occupation, as not a marginal activity but a central mechanism of imperial domination. It highlights the ways in which racialized female bodies were controlled, commodified, and used as instruments of power within the US colonial enterprise, articulating the sexual, racial, spatial, and social dimensions of oppression. Faced with the silence or absence of archives, I employ a speculative methodology based on the novel L'Espace d'un cillement ( In the Flicker of an Eyelid ) by Jacques Stephen Alexis. Fiction becomes an epistemological tool in its own right, allowing sensitive truths to be revealed and the intimate logic of domination to be explained, particularly through the character of La Niña. The analysis is thus part of a feminist and decolonial epistemology that values marginalized voices, alternative narratives, and unconventional forms of knowledge. In this sense, this article offers a critical reflection on memory, not to fill the gaps in the archives but rather to question, disrupt, and politicize them

Criminology · Political science · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies